What will be the correct form of the sentence?
2024
What will be the correct form of the sentence?
- A.
The Spacex Company’s collected losses have come up for saturation levels this year.
- B.
The Spacex Company’s collected losses have coming up for saturation levels this year.
- C.
The Spacex Company’s collected losses have come to saturation levels this year.
- D.
The Spacex Company’s collected losses have been coming up to saturation levels this year.
Attempted by 9 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
In English, the present-perfect tense is formed as ‘have/has + past participle’. For the irregular verb ‘come’, the past participle is ‘come’ itself, not the ‘-ing’ form ‘coming’ (which belongs to continuous tenses like ‘has been coming’). Separately, ‘come up’ and ‘come to’ are different phrasal verbs: ‘come up’ typically means to arise, occur, or approach (a topic that comes up, a deadline that is coming up), while ‘come to’ means to reach, arrive at, or amount to a specific figure or condition (a bill that comes to a certain amount).
Here the sentence needs to say that the company’s losses have reached a high figure (‘saturation levels’) by this year — a completed event expressed by the simple present perfect. That calls for ‘have come to saturation levels’, using the correct past-participle form ‘come’ together with the idiom that expresses reaching a specific level.
‘…have come up for saturation levels…’ keeps ‘come up’, which conveys something arising or approaching rather than a figure being reached, so it does not carry the intended sense.
‘…have coming up for saturation levels…’ breaks the present-perfect construction itself, since after ‘have’ English needs the past-participle form, not the ‘-ing’ form, so this phrasing is not grammatically valid regardless of which preposition follows.
‘…have been coming up to saturation levels…’ is grammatically fine but changes more than the flawed idiom: shifting to the present-perfect continuous makes the rise sound still ongoing and unresolved, and it keeps ‘up’, so it does not give the single, minimal fix — replacing ‘come up’ with ‘come to’ while leaving the tense unchanged — that best matches the stated, completed sense of the losses having already reached a level ‘this year’.
So the only version that is both grammatically well-formed and semantically correct uses ‘have come to saturation levels’.